In the business world, a business card is a very important tool for people to interact with customers to introduce your products, services or yourself. Physical business cards are ubiquitous and typically provide personal contact information including card holder's name, title, telephone number, email and physical address. One problem with physical cards is that information contained often becomes partly or entirely out of date such as when card holder's job title changes, or they relocate to a different address, or move to a different company with a different phone number and email address. Furthermore, the physical card has limitations on the amount of information that can be readily conveyed before the card becomes too busy and perhaps unreadable due to the smaller font sizes. Moreover, the physical cards do not provide the ability for the card holder or the recipient to keep a log of the conversation or interaction or the context under which the card was exchanged. Whenever such an “interaction annotation” is made on the physical card by writing on it for example, the users' writing and the ability to paraphrase will ultimate make any annotations logs comparatively unintelligible.
A conventional physical business cards tend to become voluminous to handle and carry around in large numbers and consequently will get lost or misplaced. With physical card there is also the drawback for the card holder running unexpectedly running out of business cards at a large gathering such as a business convention where it may be difficult and expensive to get additional cards to hand out.
Current solutions for exchanging contact information rely on physical business cards put the burden of managing the contact information on to the recipient of the card information rather than the holder or supplier of this information. In addition, because the current methods save the contact information locally into the recipients' systems, for example, email systems' contact, mobile devices' contact or even rolodex, etc., they suffer from the data duplication problem where the same data is stored in multiple databases which must be synchronized when the contact's information is updated. This creates the issues of “redundancy” where the data is saved in multiple locations leading to potential problems in data normalization and consistency making it hard to determine which of the myriad copies of the data is correct.
These shortcomings of the traditional contact information management systems are overcome by the present invention utilizing an electronic business card wherein the contact information is saved on one centralized server and shared using electronic tokens. The recipient of the contact information creates the connection through accepting an invitation or using a token in the system. The token is typically used to establish the relationship between the supplier and the recipient of the contact.
In the system proposed, the card information is managed only by the owner of the information, i.e. the owner of the electronic business card. All contact information is stored on a contact management server accessible from the wired or wireless Internet. All the clients then access the information on an as-needed basis them from the card management server. Each user accesses the information through her credentials. Once a user logs in, the system automatically brings in the contact list from the server. This contact list is never stored on the local device or chip. With this approach it allows a user to access or manage the contact from anywhere or any device in a consistent manner.
The fundamental problem with the existing card information management is the issue of data ownership. In the systems available today, the ownership of contact information lies with the information recipient. The recipient of a contact information in a business setting will create their own data record on their own local contact management system. The contact information will have to be transformed to fit into the fields that are supported by the recipient's contact management system, regardless of the contact information specifics that may be included in the owner's contact details. For example, it is sometimes difficult, or even impossible, fit in the address information for some foreign countries into the address book or contact management software popularly used in the US. This problem is further exacerbated when custom fields are created in one client-side contact management database do not map consistency with the custom fields created on another synchronized client-side management database on another device. What is needed is a system that lets the owner of the contact information own and further manages the contact information. The owner of the contact information can define the custom fields that make most sense in their specific situation and have this contact information be simply viewed, not copied, on the client-side software used by the recipient of the contact information. The recipient never has to update their version of the contact information since they don't own it, and cannot make changes to it. So when the contact information owner's phone number changes, they go and update the information on the database server, and the new phone number becomes visible to all of the recipients the next time they view the contact's electronic business card. The client side does not need to be constantly kept in sync.
The system disclosed transfers the ownership of the business card to the business contact. The recipient doesn't and in fact shouldn't be creating or editing someone else's data. This then is the philosophical difference between the current invention and the prior art as the contact data about a person is completely created, edited, and controlled only by that person. Recipient of the contact information is given the permission to see that information and perhaps only communicate with a person through the mechanism or connection that the person opens up for communication.
The invention disclosed also offers the benefits of reducing the unnecessary data explosion and redundancy with incorrect data replicated by multiple client side contact management systems. This data management problem grows exponentially in size as number of different types of client devices, number of different types of contact management software applications, the number of people in a person's network of contacts and the number of businesses relying on the contact information continues to grow. What is needed is a system for non-redundant management of contact information that allows the owner of the contact information to create and manage it, as well as control the specific fields that are visible to the recipient.
The vast majority of systems offers today are really a method for synchronization the data amongst multiple devices under one account/user. With this approach duplicated data or links have been created and card information recipients must constantly synch the data to keep it current and updated.
Another class of applications that are emerging rely on scanning the physical business cards using a scanner or a camera device. In these applications, the user scans the physical card they received at a meeting for example. The scanning device then performs an automatic character recognition of the scanned card and saves the information into the business card application software. While this approach does alleviate the problem of manually entering information into a business card application software and its local database, it does not solve the problem of data ownership. The recipient of the card continues to work with multiple copies of the business cards stored on the various devices, and the actual owner of the business card does not own the information and thus cannot keep it updated. It does introduce some additional problems however. The physical business cards usually do not have a standard format; and the great variations in the format of business cards from different countries of origin further exacerbating the problem. Often the names and company information is not correctly interpreted from the scanned image and manual intervention by the user is needed to properly assign the fields into names, phone numbers, and addresses, and sometimes even correct the mistakes introduced by poor recognition rates in certain instances. Frequently the cards with data containing foreign characters or non-typical fonts when scanned and recognized is more error prone and more frequently requires human intervention. And sometimes business professionals are pressed for time and do not properly review the scanned information and live with incorrect or incomplete data.
In summary the existing applications for managing business card data suffer from a variety of problems. These include (1) ownership of personnel data by the data owner where the recipient is burdened with the task of ensuring ‘correctness’ of the information, i.e. the recorded data is current and updated; (2) the unique font, customized fields and lack of support of fields of the various addresses and phone numbers of a different country by a card management application designed for use specifically for one country; (3) the multiple copies of an address book database maintained on the various devices used by business personnel and the need to maintain consistency across the various copies of the database—which is a different problem from the correctness of information mentioned above; (4) inherent difficulty and error-prone nature of taking a physical business card to its electronic format wherein the information may be transcribed incorrectly with mismatched fields to the data or be entered incorrectly; and (5) the one size fits all dilemma of using the existing business card management application which usually lack the support for handling addresses and idiosyncrasies of contact information from a plurality of countries. Paradoxically, even though the majority of contact profile data owned by the data owner, the recipient creates and maintains her own data like where she meets the owner, contact history, or even things to remember or task, etc. A unified and intelligent management of this information is a need that the existing systems do not fulfill.